Start rolling out the Impeachment Meme, and wave your freak flag high

Yesterday Olbermann had on Richard Wolffe, Time Magazines rather lame White House correspondent, who while not cheerleading for the Administration seems to go out of his way to declare all things the Democrats do as "Strident". As in "Joe Lieberman's reacharound toward George Bush sure was stridently done."

Nevertheless, Wolffe said something that makes me wonder if something will eventually shake down that will finally crumble the card-based ediface that is BushCo. He said that if the domestic spying operation reached beyond monitoring of actual Al Qaeda operatives Bush is in real trouble.

At the time he said it he was slightly on the side of dismissive (which to be fair seems to be his permanent disposition), but anyone who has been following the NY Times and other reports closely knows that the NSC operation went well beyond that.

Today the NY Times has more:

In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month.

But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans.

F.B.I. officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators. The spy agency was collecting much of the data by eavesdropping on some Americans' international communications and conducting computer searches of phone and Internet traffic. Some F.B.I. officials and prosecutors also thought the checks, which sometimes involved interviews by agents, were pointless intrusions on Americans' privacy...

...More than a dozen current and former law enforcement and counterterrorism officials, including some in the small circle who knew of the secret program and how it played out at the F.B.I., said the torrent of tips led them to few potential terrorists inside the country they did not know of from other sources and diverted agents from counterterrorism work they viewed as more productive.

"We'd chase a number, find it's a schoolteacher with no indication they've ever been involved in international terrorism - case closed," said one former F.B.I. official, who was aware of the program and the data it generated for the bureau. "After you get a thousand numbers and not one is turning up anything, you get some frustration."

The article also has some N.S.A. shills defending it, but they smack of bureucratic double-speak -- an agency whose expanded powers mean more money and more power and they don't want to lose it.

If the information of this program is exposed by enough Republicans that refuse to take it in the ass for George Bush, we may actually have real progress in this country.